VCE English Language and things

Articles and advice for VCE English Language. Unofficially, of course. formerly vceel13 Ask box open!

[distinguishedbaloney]

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[apocryphics]

lydia davis

[aeide-thea]

[Image ID: Screenshot of text that reads:

I value the fact that English has two parallel vocabularies—the Germanic vocabulary and the Latinate vocabulary. For example, we have the word undersea, and then we have submarine. Or underground and subterranean, all-powerful and omnipotent. [highlighted text] So we can shift registers. [/end highlight] We can say something in a very plain, blunt, Anglo-Saxon way, like ”I will not do that”—all Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Or we can say it in a fancier, more distant, abstract, Latinate way, like “I prefer not to permit myself to approach such a notion.” Or, in a passage of plain Anglo-Saxon, you can throw in one Latinate word, unexpectedly, to great effect.

/end ID]

[tlbodine]

Pro Tip: The Way You End a Sentence Matters

Here is a quick and dirty writing tip that will strengthen your writing.

In English, the word at the end of a sentence carries more weight or emphasis than the rest of the sentence. You can use that to your advantage in modifying tone.

Consider:

In the end, what you said didn't matter.

It didn't matter what you said in the end.

In the end, it didn't matter what you said.

Do you pick up the subtle differences in meaning between these three sentences?

The first one feels a little angry, doesn't it? And the third one feels a little softer? There's a gulf of meaning between "what you said didn't matter" (it's not important!) and "it didn't matter what you said" (the end result would've never changed).

Let's try it again:

When her mother died, she couldn't even cry.

She couldn't even cry when her mother died.

That first example seems to kind of side with her, right? Whereas the second example seems to hold a little bit of judgment or accusation? The first phrase kind of seems to suggest that she was so sad she couldn't cry, whereas the second kind of seems to suggest that she's not sad and that's the problem.

The effect is super subtle and very hard to put into words, but you'll feel it when you're reading something. Changing up the order of your sentences to shift the focus can have a huge effect on tone even when the exact same words are used.

In linguistics, this is referred to as "end focus," and it's a nightmare for ESL students because it's so subtle and hard to explain. But a lot goes into it, and it's a tool worth keeping in your pocket if you're a creative writer or someone otherwise trying to create a specific effect with your words :)

[theaudientvoid]

[theaudientvoid]

Specifically, to "swash a buckler" referred to the act of pounding a buckler (small shield) against one's own chest as a sort of macho display.

[st-just]

@theoutcastrogue

[squareallworthy]

Bring this back! Call someone a postshit today!

[ralfmaximus]

A few hundred years from now linguists will look back on this era and wonder what the fuck happened.

“the verb ’shitposting’ appeared abruptly in the early 2000s but nobody knows how or why because the original venue (an electronic webbed site named twittlr or perhaps tungl) no longer exists, all those recorded assets destroyed during the Great Infocalypse of 2024"

[urulokid]

FUN ENGLISH FACTS!!!!

“mine uncle” somehow got turned into “my nuncle” in the 1600s this sounds so fake but i assure you “nuncle” was a real word people used, all thanks to MISDIVISION, also called REBRACKETING. It’s the same reason “a napron” (from mappa, then nappa) got turned into “an apron” and for some crazy fucking reason we decided to drop “nuncle” and go back to “uncle” but kept “apron” instead of “napron”

“indeed” used to be “in deed” as in “i will do this in word and in deed” meaning your ass was gonna go DO something FOR REAL, you can COUNT ON ME. It got turned into one word, which then wound up meaning almost the same thing. Kind of like “all right” vs “alright”. 

“shamefaced” originally was the archaic “shamefast” as in you’re so ashamed you’re stuck there 

“bridegroom” came from OE “bridgome”, “gome” being a word for “man”

eggs were called “eyren” (as in things from eyries) in England until the old norse derived term “eggs” became the standard term. because of the massive number of dialects in england during themiddle ages this sort of thing led to Outright Hilarious Misunderstandings. there’s a story about some dudes in 1490 who sailed from London down the Thames 20 miles and asked a lady to make them some eggs and she was like “i don’t speak french what the hell are you saying to me” BA DUM TSSSSSSSS

“explode” once meant “to force a performer off the stage”

the word “funk” dates from the Tudor era and was a word for the smell of tobacco smoke. that’s right, shit was funky with Henry VIII

“noon” comes from the latin “novem” meaning “nine”. the roman way of counting time meant that the ninth hour of the day was about 3 PM. (they started at dawn being hour one and moved on from there)

“slut” just meant “an untidy messy dirty person” up till actually fairly recently

“cumberground” is an archaic word meaning “a useless person who just takes up space”. i expect you all to make good use of this when referring to a certain british actor who looks like the middle stage of an animorph

“woman” is derived from “wifmann” (wif- meaning wife, a really old word for woman, and -mann meaning human being) meaning “female human”. so the next time you see anyone deciding they’re being A Super Radical Feminist and spelling “woman” like “womyn” because the word MAN is in there and THEREFORE it must be the WORST, gently remind them that “woman” and “man” don’t have the same god damn etymological root and they’re fucking up the part of the word that denotes the noun as being a human being. congrats radfems you done it u saved the city

[vce-el]

This letter (source)

And this response (source)

[onecunninglinguist]

Also interesting note: there are small quirks that I see between American and British English

For instance: Americans don’t really say ‘have done’. Like if you say ‘would you have eaten that food if you knew it was hers?’ an American would say (if so) “I would have.” I see Brits (I’m not aware if Scottish English or Irish English do this, so Brits it is) say ‘I would’ve done’ more often. Overall, helping verbs are included more often in British English even with the rest of the sentence removed.

Helping verbs really are the thing I’ve noticed the most. Ways of forming contractions that I see and can immediately peg as ‘not American.’ Reading the earlier-mentioned article by a Brit, I see ‘you’ll not’ and that sets off my British English radar hard. Or when I looked it up, saying ‘they might do’ when asked if someone might/may do something, Americans wouldn’t say that but Brits might (do :3). 

I think in the past it’s pinged my BE radar and I’ve flipped to the back to discover that the book is set in the UK or written by a Brit. (In my defense I live in New England and we borrow many, many place names.)

[vce-el]

1192 points and 1069 comments so far on reddit

See comments on this post for some interesting Australian slang!

[vce-el]

[vce-el]

The Age letters, Feb 2016

A collection of articles from The Age.

[vce-el]

The Age, 9th Jan 2016, p29

[vce-el]

Togs or swimmers? Why Australians use different words to describe the same things

Australian's care so much about regional differences in words because it's a reflection on a person's identity.

[raisel-the-riveter]

possibly my favorite tumblr linguistics thing is the one where you want to all caps a phrase but you leave just the first letter lowercase to demonstrate that you’ve sUDDENLY BEEN OVERCOME BY EMOTION

[tangleofrainbows]

re: how teens and adults text, I would be super interested for you to explain your theory!

ok SO. a lot of this comes from various stuff i’ve seen on the linguistics of tumblr, but at the heart of it is that people in my generation (at least in the us; idk abt other countries’ timelines on this front) went thru (or are still going thru) our Formative Social Years in an environment where we’d regularly interact with even our closest friends on text-only platforms (whether texting or gchat or fb messages or w/e), and b/c so much linguistic/social information is actually conveyed by facial expression and tone of voice, we’ve collectively made up all of these textual ways of conveying that in a concise, efficient way

so like, sometimes on this blog i’ll talk about “straight people”, and sometimes i’ll talk about “str8 ppl”, and even tho i would pronounce those the same, the first is much more neutral — it would probably happen in the context like “i’m not sure how i feel about straight people writing stories that center around experiences of homophobia” — than the second, which which is much more frustrated/venting — it would be more likely to crop up in the context of “all i want is to live quietly in my little queer utopia but no str8 ppl have to come along and heteronomativity UGH #over it #whatever #NOT RLLY OVER IT”. or even with more subtle things like end punctuation: “i’m not going” basically just means i’m not currently planning to go to the thing; “i’m not going.” carries much more of a connotation of “i have seriously considered going and have Reasons for staying at home” (and note that capital — “i have Reasons for staying at home” feels different than “i have reasons for staying at home”). (and this isn’t even getting into things like shitposting or advanced memeology, but there are specific textual markers that go with things like that, some of which would be pronounced if you read them aloud, but many of which wouldn’t be)

but, crucially, for these kinds of things to carry meaning, they have to be used consistently: if i use “str8 ppl” and “straight people” interchangeably in all contexts (as i do for something like “the supreme court” vs “scotus”), then there’s no way to develop a distinction in meaning between the two — the only way to do that is to consistently use the different orthographies in different contexts. (to take another example: if something is “great”, then it’s solidly good. if something is “gr8”, it’s more in the land of “i can’t quite believe this is as earnest/tacky/tasteless as it is but i’m weirdly into it anyway?” (sometimes with a side helping of “do i just enjoy this ironically or do i genuinely enjoy it there is no way of knowing please send help”))

the upshot of this is that to be fluent in tumblr (or texting, or fb messenger, or w/e) means to actually be paying a lot of attention to subtle points of grammar and spelling, to know when to use “did u kno” or “ur” or even pull out an old-fashioned tip of the hat to “e733T haxxor 5killz”. most of these are very subtle distinctions, the kind of things you feel intuitively rather than write out explicitly, and so it’s very hard to convey them concisely and accurately to someone who’s not already immersed in the linguistic environment

and let’s be real, people in my parents’ generation aren’t. i mean, sure, many of them have facebook accounts, but these kinds of platforms weren’t around when they were in their “really getting to grips with social interaction” years, and their most important social interactions usually don’t take place exclusively online. for me, all of my closest friends are people i’ve only interacted with online for more than a year now (with a few brief face-to-face visits when various travel arrangements have allowed), so tumblr, facebook, and gchat are absolutely critical to my social life and interpersonal interactions; for my parents, their closest friends are people they see in person at work every day, so social media is a light overlay to their social lives, not the thrumming core

as such, my parents don’t grok these distinctions. to them “what are you doing?” means the same thing as “lol wut r u doing”; “gr8” is just like “great” (and “gr9” takes some parsing … ); dogespeak doesn’t have the same distinctive valence that it does to us. since they don’t know about these distinctions, they don’t feel the need to maintain more “proper” spelling/grammar when texting with a friend — different people have different set points for this, obvs, but in general i feel like “standard (setting aside all the class and racial implications in that term …) spelling and grammar” (with lighter-than-standard punctuation and capitalization) translates to “relatively neutral/pleasant conversational voice”, and then deliberate misspellings, abbreviations, letter substitutions, and grammar deviations are markers used to indicate shifts in mood — i have a vague sense that bitterness tends to collapse down and preserve grammar but weird spelling (“lyk w/e im happy 4 u but pls, i kno u lied 2 get that”) whereas enthusiasm tends to preserve spelling but weird grammar (“what i can’t even no how do air AMAZE”). since people in my parents’ generation don’t realize that doing so unintentionally changes the way their words come across, they feel free to text “poorly” (ie with lots of errors/substitutions, generally mixing various text-flagged vocal tones in ways that are often incoherent) in order to do so more quickly (b/c lbr typing everything out can be a pain (esp on a non-smartphone), and since parents don’t do it as much, they’re not necessarily as fast as our spry young fingers on a familiar interface)

so yeah, that’s what i suspect is going on

tl;dr: parents don’t use orthography to mark vocal tone in the way youngfolk do, and thus feel free to condense their texts and otherwise use textspeak. youngfolk are using orthography to mark for tone, and thus text more “correctly” to preserve their social intentions

[hello-delicious-tea]

Which is something that leads to some confusion between parents and children - I’ve gotten really upset over some of my mother’s texts because they have a period at the end, and in order to be neutral, they need to not have a period. And then I remember that the way she composes text messages (and, incidentally-not-incidentally, the way my boyfriend composes messages in text) come from a different tonal background, and they don’t use orthography in the same way to convey mood. It’s weirdly difficult to code-switch texting, I think.

[allthingslinguistic]

I’ve been referring to this particular phenomenon as having a vivid sense of typographical register, but I think it also fits well into the broader sociolinguistic idea of style-shifting. If you don’t communicate via technology that much, you basically have just one style (or maybe a simple split between formal like a professional email and informal like a text), but the more computer-mediated friendships you develop, the more you develop ways of communicating textually with all the subtle shifts in nuance that you also have offline. 

[swampwyvernismoving-deactivated]

your fave is problematic: adjectives

cannot be characterized in terms of a prototype

not a semantically definable class of concepts

lexicalize properties or characteristics that are indeterminate or variable in terms of time stability

[beesmygod]

“chuffed doesnt mean what you think it means”

it means exactly what i think it means its just some stupid word that literally has two definitions that mean the opposite thing

[mysterysnake-deactivated2013122]

what the hell

[ashwilliamsrighthand]

This makes me really chuffed

[pameladoove-deactivated20180821]

This post is quite egregious

[cornflakepizza]

Well I’m nonplussed by this whole post.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

goddamnit.

[leatherpatches-deactivated20150]

[conservative-libertarian-deacti]

[allthingslinguistic]

Oddly, for an internet style guide, Wired Style isn’t available anywhere online. The companion website beloved of my teenage years no longer exists and most of it isn’t even on Internet Archive. The book itself had two print runs, in 1996 and 1999, but hasn’t been produced since, and its e-text isn’t available for nefarious googling nor money. But a decade or two later, depending on how you count, I wanted to see how it stood up to my memories. As a text that tried to predict the future about how we’d write online, would it be eerily prescient or laughably dated? And as a text that had such an impact on me, was it worth the fond memory that I’d been holding it in for so many years? So I bought myself a used paper copy, second edition, five dollars, and I finally read it cover to cover. Verdict? Well, to use the slang of this era in homage to the previous one, it’s one part hearteyes emoji and one part cryingeyes emoji. The hearteyes parts were kind of like reading one of those nineties-kid Buzzfeed quizzes: “Oh my god, I remember when we used to talk about meatspace! Hotlinks! Web rings! Cyber- everything! Portals! Newsgroups and chat rooms! Vaporware! Netiquette! Palm Pilots! Chatterbots! The Jargon File!” It’s straightup Web 1.0: no blogs, no Wikipedia, no Urban Dictionary, no Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Google makes it into the introduction as “an innovative search-and-rank engine developed at Stanford” but the entry for search engines omits it in favour of AskJeeves, AltaVista, Go.com, HotBot, and Inktomi. And I was fascinated to learn that “a librarian named Jean Armour Polly was the first to use surfing to mean exploring the internet” although, alas, the link to her original Well post is now 404’d.   The cryingeyes parts were things like: “Oh dear, you managed to get email and homepage right, but you’re still writing Web site, the Net and the Web?” (I’ll forgive them the capitalized “internet,” because I’m still fighting with my phone’s autocomplete on that one.) “A list of bookmarks is sometimes called a hotlist.” Ahahaha nope. Big Blue as a synonym for IBM is considered “acceptable on first reference.” Yeah, not anymore. “As the Net caught on, and as more and more people started speaking in ASCII…” is not quite the cutting-edge descriptor you think it is. “Talking f2f is sometimes called facemail.” Lolwut. And, in possibly the most internet-nineties sentence ever written: TEOTWAWKI stands for “the end of the world as we know it” and is “the shorthand of Internet survivalists who believe Y2K spells doomsday.” There also some so-close-yet-so-far parts for which I lack an adequate emoji. An entry for wireless but not wifi, for WTFIGO (what the fuck is going on?) but not plain wtf, for userid and handle but not username, for newbie but not newb or n00b, for OTOH (on the other hand) and IOW (in other words) but not btw, for spam and mailbomb but not DDOS or doxxing. I-Phone stands only for Internet Phone, aka the precursor to Skype. LOL — “this shorthand for laughing out loud is big on AOL.” Meme is only in the Dawkins sense. Viral marketing — “this term plays on the idea of the meme as an advertising tool.” “We accept the prefix smart-, but worry about its overuse.” Bless your nineties hearts, how were you supposed to know we’d be in for smartphones and smartwatches and Upworthy?

Wired Style: A Linguist Explains Vintage Internet Slang

I’m on The Toast talking about retro internet language and how I became a descriptivist. Read the whole thing here - how many do you remember? 

(via allthingslinguistic)